


Group Project

by ncisduckie



Series: Duckie's TCOL Fics [1]
Category: Ghost Hunt
Genre: Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:55:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22872856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncisduckie/pseuds/ncisduckie
Summary: When Martin assigns a group project in his Parapsychology class, Mai runs into a little problem. Set in CH. 27 of "The Cases of London" by Shellsan.
Relationships: Taniyama Mai & Yasuhara Osamu
Series: Duckie's TCOL Fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1671187
Kudos: 34





	Group Project

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shellsan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shellsan/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Cases of London](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14397423) by [Shellsan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shellsan/pseuds/Shellsan). 



> I’ll use Shell's language mechanics for simplicity. General: English. Italics: Japanese.

**From “Cases of London” Ch. 27 by ShellSan**

“Here are some more famous locations. I want you all to form ‘teams’ of between four and six and work together to deduce whether or not these locations are really haunted and back up your hypothesis with evidence. You have the rest of this class, and then until next lesson. Then we will be presenting them and opening them up to your peers for review so they can refute or support your claims. Simple enough?”

There were murmurs of agreement, but no-one made any move to get up and find groups. 

Martin raised an eyebrow, clearly amused at the situation. “You all have two minutes to find yourself a group or I’ll start putting them together myself,” he warned

Like magic, suddenly they were all scrambling to get up and choose their own groups, making Mai giggle. 

Zoe and Raymon turned around to look up at them, grinning. 

“You two want to team up with us?” Zoe suggested. 

Glancing over at Yasu, they both shrugged. “Sounds like a plan.”

**. . .**

Mai’s excitement for the group project plummeted to her toes when Martin handed her the group’s assigned locales. A weight pushed into her chest as held she held the set of packets. The first location struck a chord in her heart.  _ The Winchester Mystery House _ . A flash of the Miyama estate blipped through her mind. That was the first time Bou told her about it--a house with a mindless labyrinth of added rooms. The story of a woman who was so scared that she kept building and building. It wasn’t somewhere she felt was haunted, per se. Just sad.

But in the other packets... something didn’t... something didn’t want her looking. And in its defense, wherever it was, whatever it was, she didn’t want to look at it either. Her breath stuck in her throat as she stared at the grainy xerox. 

Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.

“Is something wrong, Mai?” Zoe asked. 

She reached across the desk to grab her wrist but Mai flinched away, holding her arm to her chest. Wrong move. She managed a tight-lipped smile and waved off her classmates’ concerns. “I need Yasu to translate something for me.” She laughed humorlessly and pointed to a random place on the first page. “Second-language problems.”

Zoe frowned. “Oh... okay.”

“ _ There’s nothing in that paragraph that should trip you up _ ,” Yasuhara said cheerfully. He ignored the looks Zoe and Raymon shot at them when he slipped into Japanese. Mai was slipping back into her terrible lying and that was never a good sign. “ _ Unless you’ve forgotten English in the last two minutes. _ ”

She stuck her tongue out. “ _ Thank you for your wisdom, sensei. _ ” Trying to ignore the knot in her gut, she kept the first packet for herself and left the rest on the desk. She made a point to ignore the locations and pictures printed on them. “ _ I can’t answer these _ .”

He nodded sagely. “ _ You can tell which ones are real?” _

Mai stayed quiet. 

Yasuhara smoothed out the creases of his own packet, turning the first page down to the table so Mai couldn’t see. The middle of class wasn’t the best time to reveal her abilities, now was it? “ _ Give me a sign when you know. Kick me or something when it’s haunted. Fifty percent is the norm for guessing, right _ ?  _ You only need to be wrong half of the time _ .”

Her shoulders relaxed and she could feel her toes again. She smiled. “Thank you.” 

“I know I’m the best.” She kicked him and his smile stretched wider. “Thank you for agreeing with me.”

Raymon waved his hand. “Everything all right?” He knew Mai was quiet but he’d never seen her confused by even the more complicated terms in Martin’s lectures. There was something else going on here--and he intended to get to the bottom of it.

Mai nodded. “I misread socialite,” she said easily. Reaching down to her bag to grab a notebook, she looked back to her classmates and poised her pen above the lined page. “Let’s catch up to the others, shall we?”

“Sure,” Raymon said. “Anyone have a preference on how to get through this? I’m sure we all have opinions about these places. Can’t have a sleepover without whispering about the Tower of London when you’re supposed to be sleeping.” Panic crossed his face. He turned to Mai and Yasu, grimacing. “Unless you’re not familiar with the... with the rumor. Sorry. You two aren’t from here. You probably don’t know about--”

“And not do any research about the new country we decided to live in? Especially when it correlated with our field of research?” Yasu winked. “It’s like you don’t know us at all. Or me, really. I love to research. Mai fell asleep when I told her about the Berry Pomeroy Castle.”

“That’s not fair; I wouldn’t have fallen asleep if you didn’t decide to tell me when I finished my finals.”

“Excuses, excuses.” Yasu waved her off and refocused his attention to their classmates. 

Even if Mai was  _ technically _ right, he enjoyed teasing her more. “I say we start with instinctive reactions. Then we can tally and debate. If we can manage to agree, great. If we don’t... we’ll present dual perspectives to the class and let them figure it out.”

“Sounds easy enough.” 

Zoe grabbed the remaining packets, shuffling through them quickly. There were nine locations, including the one Mai still held. That shouldn’t take so long. How hard could it be for a small group to agree on something so simple? She set the packets aside and looked to her notes. She marked four rows of columns to count the impulse votes before looking back to her friends. “Let’s start with yours, Mai. What’s on first?”

Mai let out a slow breath. This wasn’t the hard part. The hard part would be everything else she wasn’t prepared to feel in those other packets. She carefully put up her mental shields and rolled her shoulders back. One down. Eight to go. 

“The Winchester Mystery House. And yes. Definitely haunted.”

It was her first lie and she kept her leg pressed against her chair to avoid even tapping Yasu beneath the desk. She chose her reasoning carefully, detailing the similar situation Miyama estate in as many vague words as possible. Mostly, she avoided mentioning the fact that the estate was literally inhabited by a monster before the JSPR team helped burn it down. There were no monsters at the Winchester house and making that kind of comparison would be cruel to the late lady of the house. She did mention the fire, though. Said she saw it in the newspaper, which was true enough. It was in the papers by the time she returned to school.

Coming in with the contrary (and true... to an extent), Yasu reminded Zoe and Raymon that fires don’t only happen during paranormal situations. And while there may be a lot of rumors about hauntings, there has been no conclusive evidence. 

Even in the packet, the reports mention investigations from TV personalities and nobody that attempted serious analysis. When the FAQ on their website said that the ‘mystery’ of the house was if the house was ‘actually’ haunted, he doubted it was haunted in the first place. An actually haunted place would be more concerned with cleansing the spirits or helping them move on than selling t-shirts emblazoned with the estate’s name.

His logic stole Zoe to his side, leaving Raymon bitterly on Mai’s side. The first location and they were already split. Everyone knew the Winchester House was haunted; they even made a movie about it! He remained stubbornly quiet; in his experience, nobody liked it when people brought up the movies about the cases.

The split was mended with the next location: Leap Castle in Ireland. 

Mai let herself be right and admit the haunting when Zoe and Raymon immediately agreed the castle was haunted. There was no point in being contrary in an instance where it would waste time on more important locations. Like the one that elicited that reaction when Martin first handed her the packets. 

Yasu was easily able to convince the group that the Tower of London was nothing more than a tourist trap--to the disgruntlement of Zoe and Raymon. Zoe had apparently been one of the visitors who swore she saw the ghost of Anne Boelyn during a field trip back in secondary school. But his insistence that the ghosts of Edward V and his brother Richard only appeared after their skeletons were found pulled them to his side. Mai “folded” like a deck of cards when the rest of the table was poised against her. 

Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia suffered the same tourist trap fate. Yasu didn’t even have to spin any stories. Zoe apparently saw a paranormal investigation where they uncovered a pentagram in the attic and couldn’t take it seriously anymore. She called it America’s Tower of London (to build on Yasu’s previous claims). 

While also maintaining steady reputations of “tourist traps,” both Salem and New Orleans’s French Quarter ended up with split votes. Yasu, following Mai’s kick, drew Zoe onto his side of a haunted Salem while Raymon bitterly corralled Mai to his (wrong) side. The French Quarter was believed only by Mai and Yasu, Mai having used one of her right answers on the broad swath of land. She couldn’t be certain of which particular landmarks were haunted--just that some of them were. However, Yasu’s “tourist trap” argument from the Tower of London still influenced the decisions of Zoe and Raymon. Not every famous haunted location could be famous, Raymon argued. Yasu just wondered why Raymon was in a parapsychology program when he was so resistant to believe in any hauntings. 

Mai chose the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania as another one of her ‘correct’ answers, unable to let Yasuhara work his way through that one. There wasn’t any way he would be able to come to the same conclusion that cycled through her head. This was no haunted location; it was only a place of worship. Of hope and promise and desperation. The Hill of Crosses was a pilgrimage site and a place of resilience. Not where ghosts laid in wait to scare unsuspecting visitors. 

Luckily, nobody could argue with her earnestness. She even snagged the position of having to convince the rest of the class because neither Zoe or Raymon could replicate her reasoning without sounding like a textbook caption. 

Mai led the group into the wrong conclusion that the Shanghai Tunnels weren’t haunted. There wasn’t any evidence that said that the tunnels were actually used for “shanghaiing,” which made her coercion significantly easier. She couldn’t reveal the truth of the haunting: a couple bored spirits with nothing to lose and entertainment to gain. That was almost worse than lying to them. 

Almost.

Martin looked over at Mai and Yasu’s group, interested to see how their group was faring with both a psychic and a paranormal researcher. He stopped behind Zoe and Raymon, reading Zoe’s tally of their gut reactions. It was, in theory, a way to check for some sort of latent ability. Except, the tallies next to Mai’s name were the opposite of what he expected.

Most of the answers she marked on her paper were wrong.

He remembered Yasu’s story about Mai’s original test back in Japan. How her powers manifested in a desire to avoid danger. If that was true...

Lingering behind them for a moment longer, far longer than he stayed with the other groups’ discussion of the Queen Mary and the Whaley House and Povelgia and Port Arthur, he watched them as they started discussing their next location. The Obvodny Canal in Russia. 

Zoe led the group with ease, waving the new packet in the air. She read off the summary of the location’s activity, detailing the unfortunate nickname of ‘Suicide Canal’ that, in her professional opinion, was a very leading name. “Gut reactions. Raymon?”

“No.” He shrugged. “Never heard of it, either.” 

“Same. Mai?”

She took a deep breath, feeling Martin staring at her from behind Zoe. Zoe and Raymond stared at her expectantly. The picture on the page was upside down and more smudged black than anything clear. A xerox of a xerox of a xerox. Even though all the smudges--it was the same devastation that screamed out in her head when she first took the pages from her professor. She’d felt this same way recently.  _ Too soon _ . “No,” she said finally, swallowing hard. “Not haunted.” 

In the same breath, she kicked Yasu far harder than she meant to. He jumped, covering a yelp with a cry of ‘yes!’ Taking a breath, he controlled himself and schooled his surprise. “I mean, my gut reaction is yes.” 

Martin smiled. So that’s what this was.

“May I see the rest of that?” Yasu asked, reaching across the desk. Zoe relented the packet and he flipped through the pages with Mai reading over his shoulder. “It says here that there are reports of a woman apparition just below the surface of the water. And that the few recoveries have claimed that they had no idea why they jumped.” 

“They’re being coerced to kill themselves,” Mai whispered. So that’s what this was. Why this was so familiar. How come she couldn’t recognize the connection immediately? 

Zoe turned at Mai’s mumbling. She could have sworn she said something about the case that wasn’t mentioned in that paper. She couldn’t be sure. She barely glanced it over before handing it over to Osamu. “What was that?” 

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Of course they claimed they had no idea why they jumped,” Raymond drawled. Osamu was really playing the Devil’s Advocate this whole time. And unfortunately, he was a pretty damn good advocate. Not this time. He leaned back and stretched his arms. “Nobody likes admitting they’re suicidal. Especially when they’re caught.”

“How do the statistics compare, though?” Yasu asked. “How many people attempt suicide here compared to... any other bridge? The reported deaths here seem rather high for an innocuous bridge. What are the other reasons that would cause something like this?”

“Mercury poisoning,” Mai said quickly. “Or something in the water.”

Zoe snapped her fingers. “I’m glad someone came to class with their head screwed on right.” She smiled sweetly. “That kind of reasoning is ironclad.”

“Ironclad only if the constant odd deaths don’t leave disgruntled spirits,” Yasu shot back. “Environmental factors can disprove some evidence... It can also create evidence. You can’t tell me that all these people would have committed suicide if they hadn’t been influenced by extraneous factors.”

“You can’t separate someone’s mental state after a poisoning like that. Maybe they weren’t suicidal before the poisoning but after is a different story.”

“Mercury poisoning doesn’t make you suicidal.”

Raymon crossed his arms. “That you know of.”

Yasuhara’s fingers curled around the edge of his desk, displaying an uncharacteristic show of frustration. Yasu wasn’t one for anger. He preferred sarcastic mocking or gentle shows of his research. “There is no documentation of mercury poisoning making you have suicidal ideation.”

“That you know of.” 

“That exists.”

“When did you become an expert in mercury poisoning?”

“When I started studying alternatives for paranormal activity,” Yasu volleyed back. 

Mai couldn’t handle it anymore. “I agree with Yasu,” she said quietly, shocking her classmates into silence. It was the first time that she wasn’t the last one to make her decision. Certainly, it would make her classmates suspicious. Her only solace was that this was the last location on their list with only ten minutes left of class. “The canal is haunted.”

“Mai!” Raymon cried. “You’re supposed to be on our side!”

She frowned. “What side?”

“The side against know-it-alls,” he said. Mai had been the best hold-out in their group. And she gave up so easily this time. Raymon leaned forward, prepared to argue whatever explanation she gave. But she stayed silent, with an expression he couldn’t decipher.

Zoe smacked his head, shaking him from his thoughts. “There are no sides, dumbass.” Her voice dropped when she turned back to Mai. There was something about this location that shook her classmate. But, unlike Raymon, she knew better than to pry. “I’ll agree with you, then. We’ll mark this one as haunted in our presentation.”

“Hey!”

She shrugged. “Your vote doesn’t count this time because you’re being a jerk.”

He couldn’t argue and opted to pout as the group wrapped up their discussion with time to spare to talk about the presentation. Zoe had a point but he hated being called out like that.

Mai and Yasu offered to put the PowerPoint together, leaving the notecards and talking points for Zoe and Raymon. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it’s the best they could do, given their conflicting schedules. Any time the others were available, he and Mai were already booked in the SPR office. There was no way he was going to give up their time in the office, even if he noticed Martin frowning at him as he brushed his classmates off.

“You all are doing great work,” Martin said, taking the opportunity to cut in. He rested his hands on Zoe and Raymond’s chairs. They flinched when he spoke and he chuckled lightly. “Keep it up and we’ll be sure to have a lively debate next class.”

“Th--Thanks, Professor,” Zoe managed, turning to her professor. How long had he been listening? “We hope you enjoy our presentation.”

“I’m sure I will.”

Martin winked at Mai and Yasu before turning to the next group over, having a heated discussion about the Lizzie Borden house. While he knew that the Mai and Yasu he’d had the pleasure of meeting outside of class were different personality-wise than Mai and Yasu that attended his class, this was the most obvious example of their differences. Obviously, they were hiding their experience in the field. Except, this was more than that. They were directly lying about Mai’s experience (and by extension, her power) and letting Yasu play know-it-all. Which, he was, but Mai knew plenty.

It wasn’t a problem, per se, but there were problems with secrets. They couldn’t hide their past with the infamous Oliver Davis anymore than Noll could hide his contempt for most of the human race. It was a matter of time before they had to reveal the truth. And that day was getting closer and closer if what he overheard Noll said on the phone was right. Even an anonymous book-subject would end up not-anonymous at some point.

He sighed, trying to focus as the group decided that the Lizzie Borden House was not haunted (something he could agree with). This term would be more interesting than he’d thought. 

He hoped Mai could handle all the attention that was coming for her. 


End file.
